Research Data Management: Overview

What is data management?

Research data management is the process of maintaining your research data throughout your project. It involves planning and documenting how your data will be collected or created, analyzed, stored, and shared.

1. Define a research question. Typically, this happens after conducting a literature review.
2. Search for data to re-use. Data might need to be cleaned.
3. Make a data management plan (DMP) for how you are going to organize, document, store, preserve, and share your data.
4. Collect and clean your data, storing, organizing, and documenting your data as planned.
5. Analyze the data. There are many methods and tools, depending on the discipline, the data, and the research question.
6. Archive the data so that it can be saved and accessible for long-term use.
7. Publish the data. This could be in a scholarly article, in a data visualization, a research poster, etc.

Additional pages on this guide address topics supported by SMU Libraries Research Data Management Support.

Licensed CC 2.0 by UC Santa Cruz Library

Need more help?

• For help with data management planning, description, storage, and archiving, contact Research Data Management Support at datasupport@smu.edu.  

• For help with programming, data visualization, cleaning, or analysis such as web scraping, contact OIT Data Science Support. 

• For statistical consulting, contact SMU Statistical Consulting Center.